DANCE

ETHAN STIEFEL

Dancer and artistic director

Audiences know this virtuosic Pennsylvanian as a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and from his starring role five years ago in the feature film “Center Stage.” In 2006, however, he’ll be turning up in new guises -- first as one of the “Kings of Dance” (alongside Angel Corella, Johan Kobborg and Nikolai Tsiskaridze) at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in February.

Stiefel’s most challenging new role, though, will be as the artistic director of Ballet Pacifica, an Orange County institution better known for choreographic experiment than consistent professional-level dancing. To transform the company into a world-class ensemble, Stiefel plans to hire 20 to 25 permanent members and schedule 25 to 30 weeks of repertory performances (in Southern California and on tour) plus a production of George Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” at OCPAC a year from now. His proposed budget: $6 million to $6.5 million for his first season.

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LORENA FEIJOO

Ballerina

In visits by San Francisco Ballet and various guest engagements, this Cuban-born ballerina has earned local ovations and accolades for state-of-the-art technique and unstinting intensity.

Expect more of the same in 2006 but also a new visibility starting in April, when her first feature film, “The Lost City,” is released. Set in Havana during the Cuban revolution, the film finds Feijoo playing a nightclub star in a cast that includes Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray. She dances two solos: one on pointe that she describes as “very Cuban, very ‘50s” and the other Afro-Cuban in style.

A tour with her ballerina sister, Lorna (a principal dancer in Boston Ballet), is also planned. The two created a sensation in 2004 when they appeared in a Boston Ballet “Swan Lake” (Lorna as the pure, suffering Odette, Lorena as the carnal, treacherous Odile), becoming overnight the greatest sister act in classical dance.

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THE HOLY BODY TATTOO

Dance company

Canadian contemporary dancers Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras performed together for the first time in 1987 and in 1993 formed a company in Vancouver that quickly gained a reputation for experiment and what the Washington Post called “tight, fast repetitive movement [that] slowly sears itself onto the mind.”

As co-artistic directors and choreographers, Gagnon and Gingras focus on popular culture and how it reflects the needs of the moment along with more enduring human motivations. They’ve appeared in Germany at the invitation of dance-theater matriarch Pina Bausch, at London’s Barbican Theatre and at the Cultureel Centrum Berchem in Belgium.

In April, the nine-dancer company will present the U.S. premiere of its multimedia “monumental” as part of the UCLA Live series. The Edmonton Journal praised the evening-long piece as “a dangerously demanding dance where the physical risks taken by the performers create a high-impact metaphor for the broader implications of the work.”